Data Releases

What are Data Releases

Data releases are economic figures that are released by various institutions such as governments, government agencies, and central banks, that reveal the state of the economy, production, on unemployment, and generally different sectors of the economic market.

These can have a large effect on markets as they give us an insight into how the economy is doing – whether it is doing well or badly, how production is – whether it is up or down, so it offers a way of quantifying how an economy is functioning.

The frequency of data releases varies. There can be weekly, monthly or quarterly releases.

These give us an idea of how a market is performing, or how a commodity or economy is performing over that timeframe prior to the figure being released.

So for instance, a monthly data release from March will reveal how it performed in February.

Data releases are usually available on news services, economic websites, exchange websites, a number of different sources and these can also provide you with release dates of the figures – in other words when we should expect them to be announced.

For example one of the most important figures is the Non-Farm payrolls, which is released on the first Friday of every month.

This is an American figure which tells us how job numbers in all sectors of the economy excluding the farming industry, have changed since the previous month.

Why is this important? It gives us an insight into the state of the economy in the US – whether there are more people in paid employment from the month before

If there are more people being employed then it would be positive for the economy and if there is less people being employed it would show signs of negativity in the economy and will result in the markets being affected.

For instance, if data releases for the US indicate that there is an economic downturn in the American economy, this is likely to have a knock on effect on the EU economy, the Far East, and also the rest of the world.

The implications are just as relevant whether they indicate positive or negative news. Bigger economies will have a bigger impact on global markets.

The more revealing the figure, or the more severe and unexpected the news that it is portraying, the bigger the impact is likely to be.